The future of public intellectualism lies in reforming the digital public sphere

Public intellectuals as they have traditionally been perceived, as individual scholars speaking truth to power, are a declining feature of public life. Responding to the centrality of digital communication in the public sphere Mark Murphy and Cristina Costa, argue that academia needs to further value and prioritise engagement with the digital public sphere and that beyond simply taking its forms and standards as a given, the future of public intellectualism rests on constructively improving this discourse for the benefit of the public as a whole.